10 - In a Field of Pain and Death: Lawfare in the Countryside

Summary

Chapter 10 shifts from the institutional development of the gacaca courts at the elite level to their institutional effects – real and imagined – at the mass level. Like the next chapter, it speaks to their meaning – in an interpretive sense – in the countryside. The analysis calls on the dramatis personae who appeared in various gacaca proceedings over the years: survivors and perpetrators, witnesses and defendants, inyangamugayo and the ordinary peasants who made up the audiences in Rwanda’s open-air courtrooms. Collectively, they describe a cornucopia of violence. Relying on empirical vignettes from many different legal performances over the years – some of them destructive, others cathartic, yet others profane – the chapter takes the reader into, to use Robert Cover’s evocative phrase, “a field of pain and death.”